Concordia is a Roman-themed game by Mac Gerdts, known for his rondel game mechanic games such as Navegador and Imperium. However, Concordia doesn’t use the rondel mechanic (Gerdts has made a non-rondel game before too); instead, it uses cards for both actions and scoring.

The main board shows Europe (3-5 players) or Italy (2-4 players) which is divided into provinces and each province contains several cities.  The type of good that each city produces (bricks, food, tools, wine, cloth) is determined at the start of the game which adds some variety in replay.

Players have land and sea colonists which they can move around the board via the land or sea routes that connect the cities.  Players take turns playing one of their cards from their hand and carrying out the specific action on it.

• Architect: Move colonists then spend resources and cash to build houses at cities at end of any route their colonists occupy
• Prefect: Generate resources in a region or cash
• Colonist: Generate cash, or spend resources to place new colonists
• Mercator: Receive cash and then buy/sell 2 types of goods
• Senator: Spend resources to purchase up to 2 of the 7 cards on display
• Consul: Spend resources to purchase 1 of the 7 cards on display (usually cheaper than using a Senator)
• Specialists: Generate one type of resource
• Diplomat: Do the action that is another player’s most recently played card
• Tribune: All played cards return to your hand (gain 1 cash for each card minus 3) and can spend resources to place 1 new colonist.

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This is the main game board. There is also a small board (the Guild Board) too.

What’s Your Game have released some excellent games like Vasco de Gama and last year’s superb (and undeservedly less-known) Oddville.  This year’s game, Madeira, is a very meaty eurogame –  none of the game mechanics are complicated, but there are lots of them and they are quite interwoven.

THE GAME
Each round, players select a set of action dice which they place to use on the character’s actions, and potentially the building’s actions too.  As well as cash and various resources, players have workers and ships which can be moved to various areas of the board.  When triggered, workers on fields harvest that field’s resource, workers in colonies generate resources each round, and workers in cities can generate cash, food or bread.  (Workers can also be in the city watch area.)  Ships moved to markets and colonies can exchange resources for cash and special abilities respectively.

The board shows 5 buildings and some islands areas (located in 3 regions) and each building has a character on it too.  The characters move during the game so are not always paired with the same buildings each round.

The game is played over 5 rounds.  At the start of each round, each player selects a row on the Guild Board and takes the 3 dice next to it (which have already been rolled – values are 1, 2 or 3).  Plus, the player selects one of the remaining Crown Request tiles in the same row – these earn points at the end of some rounds.  The row selected also determines turn order for the next phase, plus it allows the player to reactivate some guild favours (special abilities) if they have any that match the row’s colour.

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The main game board at game end. The large pale yellow oblong spaces are where the engineers are located during the game.

Russian Railroads is a meaty, worker-placement eurogame.  As you may expect from the title, players compete to construct the best railroads across Russia.

THE GAME
Unlike many railway-building games, there is no map to build across; however, this isn’t a hindrance and actually makes the game different to other games.  There is a central game board where players place their workers to take actions, plus each player has their own player boards to track their progress.

Each round, players take turns allocating their workers (cool-looking meeple with Russian hats) to various actions on the main game board.   For example, players can lay track which advances the relevant matching colour rail marker(s) along any of the 3 routes on their player boards.  There are 5 colours of track marker in the game (each route requiring a different mixture of track marker colours) but these colour markers are not allowed to pass one another or occupy the same space, so this means you need to consider the order in which you advance the track markers too. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the dust has settled following Spiel in Essen (due to work, sickness, voting on some awards, and life in general), I am finally able to start writing reviews of the games released this year.  Unlike other years, I didn’t get to play many of the big releases until after Spiel, rather than during it; however, I have played many now (and there’s still a sizeable pile still to play too) and can report there were loads of great games this year.

However, in advance of all the full reviews, I thought I’d post briefly about what I’ve played so far.  Last week, was a busy week with a chance to play a lot of games.  I’ve played Russian Railroads with 2 and 4 players now and it’s an excellent meaty eurogame with some pretty tough decisions, especially as there are lots of possible ways to make points but spreading yourself too thinly across a lot of them is not likely to turn out so well.  S0, you need to have a plan as well as a plan on what to do if progressing the first plan isn’t possible because other players get in the way. Read the rest of this entry »

City of Zombies is a co-operative, dice-allocating game where players are trying to stop wave after wave of zombies from attacking the city.

This is a Kickstarter project that is live at the moment.  The game was designed by Matt Tidbury to help his daughter with her arithmetic and, since then, Matt has had a great deal of excellent and positive feedback from the many schools where he has tested it with kids, as well as adult education centres and even a prison too.

Whilst the game is intended to help kids with their number skills, it offers a fun game challenge too.  Players take turns rolling 3 dice and they can then allocate them to zombies which each have a target number on them in order to destroy them.  The tricky part is that to kill a zombie, a player must use the values of the dice to match the target number on each zombie AND no dice can be left unused.  So, if you roll a 2, 4 and 5, you could add these all together to make 11 and kill one zombie with value 11, or multiply the 2 and 4 to make 8 and kill one zombie with value 8 and another zombie with value 5, etc.  Remember, every dice must be used in some way or no zombies can be removed by that player.  After each player has had a turn, the zombies advance towards the city and more zombies arrive at the top of the board.

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Spiel in Essen is almost here.  Like previous years, I will be tweeting about the games I get to play so tune in to @Metagames for that.

In the run up to Spiel this year, I have read the rules to 70 games (!) and posted 40 previews.  However, there are still many games being released which I didn’t have time to preview.  So, here are some of the other highlights on my list in no particular order:

• Amerigo (Queen) – Excellent looking game by Stefan Feld
• 1775 Rebellion (Academy Games) – Looks like a good strategy game without being too complex
• Yunnan (Argentum Verlag) – Excellent looking eurogame with quite a lot going on
• Archon (Artipia) – Worker placement game with interesting method using multiple workers (or big ones) for increased benefits
• Damage Report (Break From Reality) – Real-time sci-fi co-op
• Kings and Assassins (Galakta) – Asymetric 2-player game of assassins trying to kill king before he can reach destination
• Nauticus (Kosmos) – Another Kramer and Kiesling game with ship-building theme
• Nations (Lautapelit) – A civilised civilisation game with worker placement
• A Study in Emerald (Treefrog) – Great looking Martin Wallace game with strong theme and secret identities
• Karnickel (Lookout Games) – Push-your-luck game with rabbits collecting carrots and trying not to get hit by the train
• Pelican Bay (Three Hares in Evening the Sun) – Charming-looking tile placement game
• Cheaty Mages (AEG) – A card game with few cards by the same designer as R and Love Letter
• Malacca (Loris Games) – Players are ship captains in this short group game
• Concordia (PD-Verlag) – Mac Gedts’ new game
• Longhorn (Blue Orange) – Short and simple Bruno Cathala game
• Bankraub (Spieltrieb) – Players jostle until one of them launches a bank robbery, then all other player try and stop it
• Space Cadets: Dice Duel (Stronghold) – Looks smaller and quicker than Space Cadets with interesting game mechanics
• Corto (Matagot) – Game of token placement based on French comic strip with very strong artwork style
• Twin Tin Bots (Flatlined Games) – Cute looking game that has a lot in common with RoboRally but faster.

As I seem to say more and more these days: “So many games, so little time.”

James.

Carnival Zombie is a co-operative survival horror game where players are trying to flee Venice to escape the Leviathan, a dark evil creature lurking in the lagoon, whilst its minions of the infected walk the streets at night.

In Carnival Zombie, 1-6 players have the choice of defeating the Leviathan or, doing the slightly more sane and less heroic thing, of fleeing Venice completely.  Neither option looks easy though.  The game is split into day and night phases.  During the day, the players move through the city using the map in the corner of the board showing the network of streets between the different locations.  Some routes are harder than others (taking more time) and some locations become sunken during the game (players lose if situated there at night).  Various specific locations, which are far from the start of course, are where the different finales can take place.  So, players need to decide where they want to head to as each finale has its own set of rules.

When night falls, the players must defend the  location they are at which means being surrounded by hordes of different minions of the infected, as well as some boss monsters too, working their way towards their makeshift defences.  If they survive until dawn, they get to move through the city again and repeat this until they win or fail.

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Leelawadee is a very cute looking game of butterflies and flowers; however, whilst it’s a simple game I think there is some interesting gameplay decisions within.  Players take turns taking flowers from the random selection available for that round and placing them on their garden.  Players pick 1 flower going clockwise and then pick another going in reverse order.

If a player’s garden has a particular mix of flowers, they attract the relevant butterfly; for example, single colour butterflies are attracted to any garden which as the most (or equal-most) contiguous group of flowers that match their colour.  There are two-colour butterflies that are like single-colour but are attracted to groups of flowers comprised of both of their colour.  The five-colour butterfly goes to the connected area of flowers that have the most variety of colours.

At the end of a round, players score points for any butterflies they have at their garden (though they get fewer if the butterfly was there the round before).  Players lose quite a lot of points for every colour that is not present in their garden at the end of the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Blueprints is an intriguing abstract game where players build buildings out of dice that follow the blueprint plans they have in front of them.

Each player starts with a blueprint which shows where the dice must be placed (floorplan and how high each stack should be).  The blueprint shows a plan view (where players physically place their dice as they ‘build’ their building, as well as a 3-D view so it’s nice and clear.

On their turn, a player can pick one of the dice from the pool of already rolled dice, and a new dice is added after each player’s turn to replace the used one.  To place a dice on top of another dice, the dice on top must be of the same or great value than the one below it.  As well as their values, the colour of the dice makes a difference to the players too as each material is scored differently.

The game is made more interesting because the player’s blueprint are placed behind their player screen, so other players know what they took but have no idea what shape it is taking.

After drawing 6 dice each, players reveal and score how their buildings compare to their blueprint.  Orange (wood) dice each score 2 points for each dice adjacent (faces touching) to them; Green (recycled) dice score points based on the total green dice in the building; Grey (stone) dice each score based on their height within the building; and, Clear (glass) dice each score based on the value on their top face.

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Strike is a game about Lech Wałęsa – a Polish electrician who became a trade-union activist, co-founded Solidarity (the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union) and even became President of Poland.  The game focuses on the Polish strikes of 1980 and the agreement reached between the workers and the government.

The game is by the designer of Kolejka (Queue) which is one of my favourite games and which also has a historical Polish theme.  The game itself has a deck-building game mechanic at its centre but the game has a difference.

On their turn, a player uses their cards to move Lech Wałęsa around the board and gain better cards by using cards in their hand.  The first player to gain 2 agreement cards wins (in the real events, 21 demands were made of the government by the workers and these cards represent agreement to these demands).

The reason this seems a bit different is because there is only one Lech Wałęsa on the board and each player continues moving them from wherever they have been left by the previous player.

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